Coffee Breaks Don’t Boost Productivity After All

The finding: Taking short breaks during the workday doesn’t revitalize you—unless you do something job related and positive, such as praising a colleague or learning something new.

The research: Charlotte Fritz conducted a series of studies on how people unwind from work, looking at everything from long vacations to short bathroom breaks. In one study she surveyed workers about what kind of “microbreaks” they took during the day and how they felt afterward. Microbreaks unrelated to work—making a personal call, checking Facebook—were not associated with more energy and less fatigue, and sometimes even were associated with increased weariness. Meanwhile, breaks that involved work-related tasks appeared to boost energy.

The challenge: Are coffee breaks actually counterproductive? Are we really better off thinking about nothing but work on the job? Professor Fritz, defend your research.

Fritz: People definitely believe that “getting away” from work during the day, even for a short time, is helpful. Organizations preach the value of outside walks and encourage employees to use break time to disconnect and recharge. My own research on stress relief indicates there’s a value to disconnecting from work. But the findings on microbreaks suggest that during the workday, it may not be the best approach. Nearly across the board, microbreaks that were not job-related, such as getting a glass of water, calling a relative, or going to the bathroom, didn’t seem to have any significant relationship to people’s reported energy (what we called their vitality). Some activities, like listening to music and making weekend plans, seemed to have a negative impact on energy. The only time people showed an increase in vitality was after they took short breaks to do work-related things, such as praise a colleague or write a to-do list.

HBR: It just seems implausible that a walk outside during the day wouldn’t improve your energy.

Yes, it does seem counterintuitive. Still, going outside for fresh air during microbreaks showed no statistical relationship to vitality and fatigue levels. Helping a coworker did, though. The idea seems to be that when you’re in the middle of work, you’ll do better and feel better if you focus just on work.

That sound you hear is every manager on the planet forwarding this article to employees with a note that reads, “Get back to work, and you’ll be happier!”

Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. It’s clear that people need to get away from work in some way or another to recharge their batteries. I started my research looking at vacations. Then weekends. Then time between workdays. Then lunch breaks. Now microbreaks. What we need to do to keep ourselves up and running varies with the time frame, however. This research seems to show that on the job, it’s more beneficial to energize yourself through work-related activities.

But intense jobs—stressful negotiations or factory work, say—must require some disconnecting during the day?

Yes—during longer breaks, but not so much during microbreaks. Also, it’s important to note that my studies looked just at regular office jobs, some at a software company and a smaller sample at a consulting firm.

A lunch break is good, though, right?

Maybe. We’re looking at lunch breaks now, and we’ve started to see that if people use them to take time to reflect positively on work, to broaden their horizons, to learn something new—which could be job-related or not—or to relax, their attentiveness is higher right after lunch and sometimes even still when they leave work. Thus, it seems that work-related and non-work-related activities can be beneficial during lunch breaks.

Couldn’t a cup of coffee offer the pick-me-up you need in the afternoon?

No. Coffee breaks were associated with higher fatigue, not lower. That could just be a matter of causality: It might be that being tired makes you drink caffeine, not that drinking caffeine makes you tired. We can’t clearly interpret this finding based on the data we have so far. Though I’m not an expert on this, I think some research indicates that caffeine is energizing for a little while, but then you go back to being fatigued and need even more caffeine.

What about vacations? Please tell me they work!

They’re good. In most cases, they reduce perceptions of burnout and increase perceptions of health. But after about two weeks at work those feelings of well-being drop back to prevacation baselines. The length of the vacation doesn’t seem to change this effect much, either. But specific positive vacation experiences, like gaining a sense of mastery—climbing a mountain or learning a new hobby—have a positive impact. Part of the quick “fade-out” of the vacation effects may be due to the way your tasks pile up when you’re away. So returning from vacation is stressful. This suggests one big vacation a year is not the right model. You’ll get the same beneficial effect more often if you take three short vacations.

Your research seems to validate the concept of the 9-to-5 workday, where we come in, work hard, and then leave.

That’s the bigger picture. But technology has made it hard to leave work at the end of the day, to achieve what we call psychological detachment. Detachment is well researched and related to all kinds of great outcomes: improved health, sleep, and life satisfaction, and lower burnout. Just one caveat: Too much detachment seems to negatively affect performance. So you can’t totally check out. That just means that you don’t throw your phone out the window. You just shut it off at night.

I am totally worn out by this interview and still have two hours of work left. I would get a cup of coffee or go to the gym, but you’ve ruined all that.

Don’t be silly. Go praise a colleague, finish your work, and then at the end of the day, go to the gym, detach, and relax.